and I share is a love of old black-and-white films. The Enchanted Cottage duplicates a setting from a 1945 movie. A shy-to-the-point-of-invisible staff of who-knows-what supernaturals run the place, and I suspect it's supplied with the wicked stepmother's mirror from Snow White. Although it's been mum with me so far, I do see dead people in it.
The most complicated beings in my brave new world are the CinSims. Cinema Simulacrums are created by blending fresh zombie bodies illegally imported from Mexico with classic black-and-white film characters. The resulting "live" personas are wholly owned entertainment entities leased to various Vegas enterprises.
Hector and Ric blame the Immortality Mob for the brisk business in zombie CinSims, but can't prove it. Hector wants to wrest the CinSims from the mob's control into his. Ric aches to stop the traffic in illegally imported zombies. It's personal - he was forced to work in the trade as a child.
I'd like to help them both out, and not just because I'm a former investigative reporter crusading against human and unhuman exploitation. My own freedom is threatened by various merciless and sometimes downright repellent factions bent on making life after the Millennium Revelation literal Hell.
Luckily, I have some new, off-the-chart abilities simmering myself, most involving silver - from the silver nitrate in black-and-white films to sterling silver to mirrors and reflective surfaces in general.
Which reminds me of one more sorta sidekick: a freaky shape-changing lock of hair from the albino rock star who owns the Inferno Hotel. The guy goes by three names: Christophe for business; Cocaine, when fronting his Seven Deadly Sins rock band, and Snow to his intimates. He seems to consider me one of them, but no way do I want to be.
While thinking of my lost Achilles, I made the mistake of touching one long white lock of Snow's hair he'd sent me as a mocking gift. The damn thing became a sterling silver familiar no jeweler's saw or torch can remove from my body. Since it transforms into different pieces of often-protective jewelry, it's handy at times. I consider it a variety of talisman-cum-leech.
That attitude sums up my issues with the rock star - hotelier, who enslaves groupies with a onetime mosh-pit "Brimstone Kiss."
Then I discovered why those post-concert kisses are so bloody irresistible ... and Snow forced me to submit to his soul-stealing smooch in exchange for his help in saving Ric from being vamped to death. This kiss-off standoff between us is not over.
I've been called a "silver medium," but I don't aim to be medium at anything. I won't do things halfway. I intend to expose every dirty supernatural secret in Las Vegas, if necessary, to find out who I really am, and who's being bad and who's being good in my new Millennium Revelation neighborhood.
Chapter One
ACOYOTE YIPPED in the desert night surrounding Las Vegas.
Its sharp introductory barks escalated into a full, soulful howl at the moon.
I straightened from my feral crouch to listen.
Then I smiled.
That lonesome coyote might be the only natural critter within hearing tonight.
Even the glowing yellow moon, half full, looked pretty unnatural. Its blade-straight inner edge reminded me of a giant casino chip split down the middle.
I wasn't used to working under moonglow. Usually Sin City's gigantic bouquet of neon lights backlit my night-crawling expeditions.
Tonight, though, my beat was a raw desert landscape of distant mountains that made the flat valley floor into a huge, empty, open maw surrounded by massive saw teeth. I stood at its center, the moonlight reflecting from the steel studs embedding the arms, legs, and torso of my form-adapting black catsuit.
"Bite me," I whispered at the jaundiced half-werewolf moon, "and you'll get a jawful of broken fangs."
Something came barreling out of the darkness right for me, as if answering my invitation. Fast and furred, the yellow-beige flowing blur grew ears, hackles, and hulking shoulders as it neared - like a panting locomotive with a boar's-head cowcatcher.
I turned sideways as it charged by, kicking up sand chest-high. Then it wheeled and leaped for my throat.
"Quick," I shouted, using the word as a name, not a command. A huge pink tongue swiped my jaw and slimed my costly, FBI-approved night vision goggles. Only borrowed, alas.
I couldn't wipe the wet lenses clean on my steel-studded outfit. Scuff City. So I swept off the goggles and shook my head at the grinning wolfish face now at standing height. My waist.
"Quicksilver, you're supposed to find prey, not me," I told him.